United States CTO and Assistant to President Obama

Megan Smith was the 3rd Chief Technology Officer of the United States and Assistant to the President, serving under President Barak Obama.  As U.S. CTO, Megan focused on how technology policy, data and innovation can advance the future of our nation.

Megan is an award-winning entrepreneur, engineer, and tech evangelist. She most recently served as a Vice President at Google, first leading New Business Development — where she managed early-stage partnerships, pilot explorations, and technology licensing across Google’s global engineering and product teams for nine years — and later serving as a VP in the leadership team at Google[x] — where she co-created the company’s “SolveForX” innovation community project as well as its “WomenTechmakers” tech-diversity initiative and worked on a range of other projects.

Megan previously served as CEO of PlanetOut, a leading LGBT online community in the early days of the web, where the team broke through many barriers and partnered closely with AOL, Yahoo!, MSN and other major web players. Megan was part of designing early smartphone technologies at General Magic and worked on multimedia products at Apple Japan. She has served on the boards of MIT Corporation, MIT Media Lab, MIT Technology Review and Vital Voices, as a member of the USAID Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, and as an advisor to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and the Malala Fund which she co-­founded.

She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT, where she completed her master’s thesis work at the MIT Media Lab.